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Comment by enriquelop | Hacker News Reader

I built a pipeline that converts all Spanish state legislation into version-controlled Markdown. Each law is a file, each reform is a real git commit with the historical date. 8,642 laws, 27,866 commits.

The idea: legislation is just patches on patches on patches. Git already solves this. Instead of reading "strike paragraph 3 and replace with...", you get an actual diff.

The repo is the product. Browse any law, git log to see its full reform history, git diff to see exactly what changed.

Built the pipeline in ~4 hours with Claude Code. Source is BOE (Spain's official gazette) consolidated legislation API.

Exploring whether there's a business here — structured legislation API for legaltech/compliance, or just a useful open dataset. Curious what HN would build with this data.

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Laws intent are often clarified in courts through judgments. If you can overlay the judgements on top of the corresponding law, at correct points in time, I think that will have value. It might, for example, show which laws were referenced the most and which needed to be clarified the most. It might give insights into what legal language constructs stood the test of time and which had to be repeatedly clarified.

That's true, but it might not be as important here.

Spain is not a country with a Common Law legal system entirely like the US or the UK. They have a civil law system where prior court judgement does not form a strictly binding precedent. Prior judgements can be important, but case law is not really a thing.

I wonder how true this is, we have the same system in Sweden, that court judgement are not legally binding precedent for lower courts. But in practice lower courts will follow the rulings made by the high court.

Is it not the same in Spain at all?

It's the same in Spain, which makes OPs proposal kind of useless. The big distinction between a civil and a common law system is the fundamentals. A country's civil code is properly defined, while a common law's system is based on previous cases you have to dig through to find the basics.

> while a common law's system is based on previous cases you have to dig through to find the basics

In other words, you have to hire a lawyer. They really built a great system for themselves, didn't they?

Would be nice if someone did it with Swedens laws too!

I built it with Claude Code last summer :) Check it out: https://github.com/se-lex/sfs

It’s generated by this CLI: https://github.com/se-lex/sfs-processor (md with temporal tags, html or Git commits as output format)

Laws are often cascaded as well. Specifically in this case, Spain is subdivided into Comunidades Autonomas - each have their own elected parliament. And inside those are cities with their own local laws.

So while this project does track laws, is there any facility to determine which laws from which bodies are relevant to a specific activity in a specific location?

> And inside those are cities with their own local laws.

No, cities don't have their own laws, but the autonomous communities do have some influence in some laws and regulations (not all), like the amount of income tax you have to pay and so on. But cities within the autonomous communities don't have their own laws.

No by(e)-laws in Spain? Certainly a thing in the UK, Ireland and I believe US and Canada. Is that a common law thing?

"By-laws" is typically the name of the rules/"laws" inside of a company or organization, I'm not familiar with that word in the context of "nation-wide criminal/civil laws".

Regardless, cities do not have their own "local laws" in the way your comment made it seem. We have national laws, and minor differences in various autonomous communities, since they have some legislative power to control their own industry, commerce, education and some more stuff.

> "By-laws" is typically the name of the rules/"laws" inside of a company

I suspect that this should be qualified by "in the US"

No, I was talking about Spain, I have no idea how it works in the US. I thought mentioning "autonomous communities" was enough context to make it evident, but maybe it wasn't.

I was misled then by the word being in English. The name bye-law in British English generally applies to local authority (town or county) laws rather than the internal rules of a commercial entity.

as an american I might call those “local ordinance” when they come from a smaller rulemaker like a town

> inside of a company or organization,

Corps and cities are very similarly structured. Each are charted at the start, with corps getting governed by boards and c-suite types while cities have mayors and city council types. Both file paperwork to exist within the state. Both are subject to state laws, but are allowed to make up regulations specific to them as long as they are within the state's laws.

In the end, it's all just paperwork, at least in the US

Local authorities in Spain do have the authority to enact their own law-ish regulations, which are called 'ordenanzas'. For example, if I remember correctly, motorbikes are allowed to park on the pavement by default in Barcelona unless a sign says otherwise, but it is forbidden in Madrid unless a sign explicitly allows it.

I think local government in Spain has at least as much authority as it does in the UK, maybe more, but almost certainly less than it does in the US.

I may be wrong, but I think autonomous community legislation is not published in the BOE itself (the Official State Gazette), but rather in each of their corresponding official gazettes (e.g. DOGC for Catalonia, BOCM for Madrid, BOA for Aragon, BOJA for Andalusia, etc.).

yes: Comunidades Autonomas can only defined laws as "permitted" by the central government under a Estatuto de Autonomia (Autonomy statute? not good with legal jargon), which is effectively a law of its own. So at the central level the law says "in this particularly region, matters of education are dealt with regionally", and then that's when regional laws apply. Same from local laws. In essence, all laws emanate from the central government, but the central government decides to delegate some areas; technically, they could always take it back.

Rarely in a civil law jurisdiction, essential in common-law jurisdictions.

Perhaps reference it in the commit trailer?

Another thought. Assuming such a dataset (laws+ judgement) could be built, an argument can be made to Parliament to draft new laws that take into account all those judgments and then mark those judgments and old laws in a way that they can no longer be referenced (archived?). This might simplify future cases leading to lower legal costs.

And who knows maybe a way could be found to create smart contracts (smart oracles? smart judges?) and those could lead to instant judgements.

I looked into this a while back and IIRC, the consolidated legislation doesn’t cover all legislation but only a handful.

Also, in my experience (having built in this space before), regulations aren’t really the issue. Court rulings are, because there’s no open data for them in Spain. And the potential users for a paid product (legal professionals) already know the law; the key players (big law firms) have their own databases of annotated and verified court rulings and other documents.

Oooh Can you elaborate a bit how the gazette is publishing them? Like what format did you have to parse. And how many documents were there in total? I tried doing the same for German laws 1-2 years ago but LLMs weren't smart enough yet. And the costs would've been at least a couple of thousand €.

Ed: Nevermind, I missed the "BOE (Spain's official gazette) consolidated legislation API" part. Sending jealous greetings from Germany. We just have a bunch of PDFs in Germany. And the private entity that has been publishing them for decades even claims copyright on them!

Heh we have the exact same status in Greece. It’s sad the upstream is so sloppy.

Do you mean DIN?

No I'm talking about the Bundesanzeiger (the publication where new laws are published) being privatized.

On a purely philosophical level, what does it even mean for a law to be “public” or “on the book” if access to it is restricted by something like copyright? This seems very backward to me.

This is brilliant. I had thought about this for a long while, you see laws that are just "go to law 132 and amend paragraph 4, then go to law 24 and amend paragraph 9". Basically "laws" are recorded as diffs, and then it's up to the reader to put up the final product in their heads. They should be doing it this way!

To be fair, the BOE website often offers the consolidated version for many important laws, which includes further amendments by other laws in one text.

Very cool project. How are you thinking about indexing and discoverability? Git gives you the change history, but navigating the corpus itself seems like the harder problem: Finding related laws, understanding hierarchical relationships between statutes...

Have you considered embedding semantic hierarchical structure directly in the markdown? Something like https://github.com/wikibonsai/semtree ? It lets you build a navigable tree across markdown files using indented [[wikilinks]] as the organizational spine. Could be a natural fit for legislation that already has an inherent taxonomy (constitutional → organic → ordinary, or by subject area).

This is really cool. I've thought about it for a long time as well but never had the idea of just using git, which is equal parts genius and "obvious" in hindsight, as most great ideas are.

I think the corollary that comes to mind is that reforms, with their git commits, are incrementally valuable if they refer to other parts of the legislation, previous commits, etc. to give more context as to the intent at the time of the law. So maybe there's a way to distill the legislative process into more PR and commit-oriented work—likely ex post as you did here, but perhaps in the future as part of an actual workflow.

And then maybe I'd pitch the idea to some technologically-inclined local government.

Please! Can you make the same for Portugal? Laws here are a mess of reforms...

is there a similar API for Portugal?

> Exploring whether there's a business here — structured legislation API for legaltech/compliance, or just a useful open dataset. Curious what HN would build with this data.

Compiling legal data for specific domains and then selling processes that rely on your private compilation is a battle-tested business plan, but there's a lot of manual work involved and the cost of that work becomes a barrier to entry.

Generally speaking, the people who'd like to cross that barrier are both open to ideas and funded well enough to run little experiments.

It would be a good place to start if you wanted to hard fork the government.

You need some land to host your own legislation

Why? I can opt in to a set of laws without a border or a building involved.

> Exploring whether there's a business here — structured legislation API for legaltech/compliance, or just a useful open dataset. Curious what HN would build with this data.

Verrsioning+search is like feature zero of any law software. In many countries (such as next door Portugal) it's even part of the standard public website provided by the state. Not to diminish your effort but yeah, people have thought of that before x)

Would love to get the U.S. tax law as a dump of markdown files. Then everyone can build their own TurboTax.

https://www.irs.gov/privacy-disclosure/tax-code-regulations-...

I’ve thought of this of many times! But you’re missing the most important part: every reform should be a PR. With discussions and all. That would be the purest form of voting. And all decisions to reach the current state of a law would ve registered and available for everyone to read. Democracy 2.0.

Dreaming costs nothing.

This is already the case since parliamentary minutes are typically on the web as well. Unfortunately of course, this only includes the "official" discussions, not those taking part in corridors, offices, or lobbies... :)

the problem with Roman-Napoleonic systems is that this will let you find changes to articles in law codes, but large swathes of the law are just declared out of context, and its interaction with the rest of law is for lawyers and judges to interpret - which is what makes them inherently different to case law systems

note that even in case law systems, legislators can still pretend to be clarifying or reinterpreting things to essentially change law, but at least the supposed principle is that law has to stay coherent and go through all the pertinent checks and balances

in the UK legislation traces back to its origin, with all relevant amendments, see for example:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/8/contents

Congratulations, this is a brilliant resource. You have done one of those countless things which I often think about doing, but my utter lack of follow-through and other distractions make it a fantasy. I cannot wait to clone the repo and explore it.

As to what can be done with the data, maybe one interesting step could be a graph-database regarding laws which reference other laws or the definitions that they depend on?

I’ve had the idea of playing with our laws and trying to ask questions about their growing volume and complexity. This is timely and dope Enrique - mil gracias!

Too bad that author, and committer are individuals and not lists. It would be good to see who wrote them and how the voting went as well.

4 hours from idea to 27k commits. the velocity with agentic tools is genuinely disorienting sometimes.

I've long wanted to do this, but don't have the api. This is much harder to do with pdfs

cool idea, how far back (in time) do those 27k commits go?

Just thinking how this could maybe used for (automated) research / visualization on the evolution of (spanish - in this case) law

> how far back (in time) do those 27k commits go

Looking at the commit dates (which seem to be derived from the original publication dates) the history seems quite sparse/incomplete(?) I mean, there have only been 26 commits since 2000.

It seems the commits aren't in proper date order. Here are some newer changes, placed before the latest commits: https://github.com/EnriqueLop/legalize-es/commits/master/?af...

It's related to commits actually having a parent-child structure (forming a graph) and timestamps (commit/author) being metadata. So commits 1->2->3->4 could be modified to have timestamps 1->3->2->4. I know GitHub prefers sorting with author over commit date, but don't know how topology is handled.

> It's related to commits actually having a parent-child structure (forming a graph) and timestamps (commit/author) being metadata.

Yeah, I think everyone is aware. It's just that the last couple dozen commits, to me, looked like commits had been created in chronological order, so that topological order == chronological order.

> I know GitHub prefers sorting with author over commit date, but don't know how topology is handled.

Commits are usually sorted topologically.

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